Bad Shakespeare

Nov18

From fuelling witch-hunts to buttering up the ruling classes - Cedric Watts looks at Shakespeare's less admirable side.

My introduction to
the Wordsworth Macbeth makes the
point that though Shakespeare is internationally lauded, his influence has
sometimes been bad. We can’t have it both ways: if we praise him for his wise
and genial humanity, we must also condemn him for furthering intolerance and for
propagating lies that flatter the ruling class.

In the case of Macbeth (written probably in the period 1603-6), his depiction of
the ‘Weyward Sisters’ undoubtedly added to the craze for witch-hunts.
Shakespeare’s prime motive was undoubtedly flattery of King James VI of
Scotland, recently James I of England, whose book Dæmonologie (1597, reissued in 1603) taught that witches, wielding
infernal supernatural powers, really existed and should be ruthlessly
extirpated. God Himself (according to Exodus 22:18) had stated: ‘Thou shalt not
suffer a witch to live.’ As depicted by Shakespeare, the Weyward Sisters in the
play are far more vile and horrific than the ‘weird sisters’ described in his
main source, The Chronicles of England,
Scotland, and Ireland by Raphael Holinshed and others. Subsequently, in the
17th century, many unfortunate women were accused of witchcraft,
were tortured and finally killed. Logically, Shakespeare should share some of
the guilt for these horrors. As I pointed out, Shakespeare repeatedly departs
from Holinshed in order to flatter James I, often by whitewashing Banquo.

Henry
VI, Part 1, to which Shakespeare contributed, depicts Jeanne d’Arc, the
patriotic French warrior, as a witch who offers her body and soul to devils. (Jeanne,
who had been burnt at the stake, was declared a saint by the Pope in 1920,
prompting George Bernard Shaw’s fine play, Saint
Joan.) In Henry VI, Part 2, a
devil, or the Devil, appears on stage to answer the call of Margery Jourdan: she
is evidently another witch.

Shakespeare thus, alas, lent his
eloquence to the negative side of a controversy. On the positive side stood
Reginald Scot, whose Discoverie of
Witchcraft (1584) scorned witch-hunts and derided the notion that poor
women held supernatural powers – for, if they did, they would be rich. We may
add that in the play The Witch of
Edmonton, by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford, a ‘deformed and
ignorant’ woman is driven to witchcraft by social persecution.

I referred above to Shakespeare’s ‘lies
that flatter the ruling class’. You can find plenty of examples in Richard III. There, Shakespeare was
flattering the political establishment of his own day by supporting the
official ‘Tudor’ view of Richard III: a thoroughly hostile view. Although the
historic Richard undoubtedly committed heinous acts, he was not as culpable as
the play suggests. For instance, if Henry VI was murdered, which is probable
but not certain, in reality the most likely suspect is not Richard III but
Edward IV. Though Shakespeare makes Richard responsible for the murder of
Clarence, Clarence had in fact been prosecuted for treason by Edward IV: hence
his execution at the Tower of London.

In Richard III, Shakespeare
also distorted history so as to flatter Ferdinando, Lord Strange, and Henry
Herbert, second Earl of Pembroke. Why?Before the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1594, Shakespeare
is believed to have worked for the company known as Lord Strange’s Men, patronised
by Ferdinando, Lord Strange, a descendant of the Lord Stanley so favourably
portrayed in the play. Again, Henry Herbert was the patron of Lord Pembroke’s
Men, another company for which Shakespeare wrote; and in Richard III Pembroke’s ancestors, Sir Walter Herbert and the Earl
of Pembroke, are introduced so that they can be associated with the victorious
Richmond and praised. Indeed, in Richard
III,Richmond, who became King Henry
VII, and the Tudor dynasty were flattered so memorably that the play would
shape many people’s understanding of the history of those times.

Perhaps the most shocking example of Shakespeare’s readiness to distort
history in order to exalt the ruling class is the play ludicrously called All Is True, better known as Henry VIII. (It was written partly by
John Fletcher but largely by Shakespeare.)The play culminates in fulsome celebration of the birth to Queen Anne,
formerly Anne Bullen, of the Elizabeth destined to rule England. Numerous
people prophesy that the baby Elizabeth will eventually become an unsurpassed
monarch. In Act 5, for example, Archbishop Cranmer prophesies that she will be
all-virtuous and as wise as the biblical Queen of Sheba (‘Saba’):

She
shall be...

A pattern to all princes
living with her,

And all that shall
succeed. Saba was never

More covetous of wisdom
and fair virtue

Than this pure soul
shall be.

What’s more, her
heir (James I)

Shall star-wise rise as
great in fame as she was,

And so stand fixed.
Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror,

That were the servants
to this chosen infant

Shall then be his.

And, of course,
Henry VIII joins in the rejoicing. He declares:

This oracle of comfort
has so pleased me,

That when I am in heaven
I shall desire

To see what this child
does, and praise my maker.

And all this jubilation is nonsense.
In reality, far from being thrown into prophetic ecstasy by the birth of
Elizabeth, Henry was bitterly disappointed, for – yet again – he was confronted
by a female offspring instead of the longed-for male. Nothing in the play
indicates that Elizabeth’s mother, Queen Anne, would soon be executed for
‘treasonable adultery’. Nor does the play indicate that in order to divorce
Queen Katharine and marry Anne, Henry was obliged to initiate a vast change in
the nation’s religion, a change resulting in cultural and social turmoil,
despoliation and martyrdoms. Repeatedly Henry is depicted as the conscientious
innocent monarch, or, later, as one who wisely intervenes to save Cranmer from
trumped-up charges. At least the play shows that Henry was sexually attracted
to Anne Bullen before he divorced Katharine, and Katharine is depicted at
length as a long-suffering, loyal queen who, with great dignity, undergoes a
contrived downfall. Indeed, it is this rôle which largely redeems the play on
stage.

In Shakespeare’s works, one of the
oddest pieces of flattery is that found in the First Folio (1623) text of Henry V. Remember that the Earl of Essex
was a friend of the Earl of Southampton, and it was to Southampton that Shakespeare
dedicated his long poems, Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. In
the Prologue to Act 5 of Henry V, we
are told that the people of London welcomed King Henry on his return from
France, and the speech continues:

As, by a lower but
loving likelihood,

Were now the General of
our gracious Empress –

As in good time he may –
from Ireland coming,

Bringing rebellion
broachèd on his sword,

How many would the
peaceful city quit

To welcome him! Much
more, and much more cause,

Did they this Harry.

There’s a scholarly
consensus that ‘the General of our gracious Empress’ is Robert Devereux, the
illustrious Earl of Essex. On 27 March 1599 he had set out from London to
suppress the Earl of Tyrone’s ‘rebellion’ in Ireland. He failed, incurring the
enmity of Queen Elizabeth, and arrived back in London on 28 September 1599. It
follows that this passage must have been written after 27 March but before the
news of Essex’s failure reached London, around midsummer.

The implications of the allusion to
Essex are considerable. First, it shows that Shakespeare’s history plays, even
when dealing with the past, had clear relevance to contemporaneous events. In
this case, audiences were encouraged to relate Henry’s successful French
campaign of 1415 to Essex’s rôle in the colonial struggle in Ireland.
Shakespeare here supports that costly struggle to maintain English dominance
abroad.

With hindsight, the tribute to Essex
is highly ironic. Essex, having failed in his Irish mission, became a
discredited malcontent. On 8 February 1601, with Southampton at his side, he
led a band of supporters through London, hoping to stage a coup d’état against Elizabeth’s counsellors. The attempted coup was a failure, and Essex was
executed on February 25th. (Southampton was also sentenced to death,
but the sentence was commuted to imprisonment, and he was eventually released
by King James I.)

Another remarkable aspect is that
the once-topical allusion to Essex remained in the text of Henry V when it was published in that 1623 Folio. You would think
that it was, by then, clearly out of date, overtaken by events, and politically
embarrassing to Shakespeare’s company. Yet it remained. It would surely have
been omitted from actual stage-productions after the summer of 1599. What its survival
in the book suggests is that even the relatively good text of the play
published in the First Folio does not represent any ‘final’ version of the
play, and that the compilers of that Folio were not particularly attentive to
details of the material that they assembled. Evidently, performances not only
of Henry V but also of other
Shakespearian plays were augmented by topical details as opportunities arose
and were pruned of them as circumstances changed. The Folio text represents an
out-of-date unpruned version of the play.

We have seen that Shakespeare could
lick the boots of the ruling class when he thought that by doing so he could advance
himself and his company of players. But there is another side to him, of
course: some of his works can be regarded as subversive of authority. On the
eve of Essex’s rebellion, his supporters paid Shakespeare’s company for a
special production of Richard II:
they believed that that play about the overthrow and murder of a monarch could
help their cause. Queen Elizabeth is reported to have said: ‘I am Richard II[:]
know ye not that?’ The company was lucky not to be punished.

In Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of
history plays, Richard II, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and Henry V, royal authority is repeatedly
questioned; and, if the eventual success of Henry V seems triumphant, that
triumph is incisively undercut by the Epilogue of Henry V, the concluding Chorus, which says that all his
achievements came to nothing in the following reign. The notion that divine
providence governs royal rule is assailed in King Lear, and there Shakespeare departs from his sources in order
to emphasise the uselessness of invoking supernatural aid.Epic warfare is thoroughly stripped of glamour in Troilus and Cressida, a brilliantly
subversive anti-war play which derides the theological paraphernalia of Homer’s
Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. Yes, Troilus and Cressida even mocks the concept of a divinely-ordained
cosmic hierarchy, a concept which used to be deemed (by E. M. W. Tillyard and
his followers) an essential part of ‘the Elizabethan world-picture’. So perhaps
Shakespeare is his own best critic. In spite of the immense pressure of
censorship in his day, he could at times challenge his era’s orthodoxies. He
knew that heretical Christopher Marlowe had been lethally silenced in 1593. The
radical, progressive Shakespeare is to be found in that second tetralogy, in many
of the sonnets, and in Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, Othello,King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra.

Thanks to his phenomenally articulate
intelligence and imagination, Shakespeare remains our finest dramatist, even if
some of the plays disgust us by their craven sycophancy. Of course he had his
faults. After all, that makes him more like us.

Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of English, University of Sussex is the editor of our Shakespeare series